


The Case For Finding Samantha (X-Files seasons 7-9)

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [23]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, alternative story arc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 10:30:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2147343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So. I am about halfway into the horror that is Season Eight. I am assured that Season Nine gets worse.</p><p>I was thinking to myself, well, obviously giving these guys a pregnancy storyline was a really bad idea. And I’ve always hated the “Biogenesis” crap. But really, after the conspiracy is wiped out in “One Son,” what else was there to do? Could there have been ANY way to string this show along for another few years that wouldn’t have ended in the same misery?</p><p>And I thought: I know what I would have done.</p><p>I would have brought back Samantha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Case For Finding Samantha (X-Files seasons 7-9)

 

So. I am about halfway into the horror that is Season Eight. I am assured that Season Nine gets worse.

I was thinking to myself, well, obviously giving these guys a pregnancy storyline was a really bad idea. And I’ve always hated the “Biogenesis” crap. But really, after the conspiracy is wiped out in “One Son,” what else was there to do? Could there have been ANY way to string this show along for another few years that wouldn’t have ended in the same misery?

And I thought: I know what I would have done.

I would have brought back Samantha.

Samantha drops out of the mythology after a few years because she was over-used in the earlier seasons. So many times in the first few years Mulder thinks he’s found Samantha and it always turns out to be wrong; it’s a clone, or some actress Cancer Man hired, or whatever. By the time Mulder mentions, at the beginning of Season 7, that he’s still looking for Samantha, it seems random. Samantha hasn’t been on his radar for a good long time.

The way Season 7 resolves that plot is very strange. Carter doesn’t want to give up the alien abduction story line; but he also wants to be done with it. So he crosses the alien abduction/conspiracy plot with a serial killer plot (this has been the alternative explanation for her death, ever since “Paper Hearts”) and out of that comes “Sein und Zeit” and “Closure.” I remembered virtually nothing about “Closure” from the first time around, and that’s because it makes no goddamned sense. I’d be sorry to lose that little scene in the diner with Scully helping Mulder get through reading the diary; and I’d be sad to lose that moment when he finally accepts that Samantha is dead and says, “I’m free.” I coudl have done without the mondo cheesiness that gets him there and the completely nonsensical Santa Claus Killer X-File that Carter tries and fails to connect to Samantha’s story. 

But there would have been another way to resolve that story line. He could have found her alive. And dealing with her return would have been a lifelong process, so that would have involved growth for everyone—for him, for Scully, and for Samantha, who would finally be a character in the show, and who would have to somehow be incorporated into the M/S dynamic.

I imagine it going something like this:

* She’s introduced as a minor character in an X-File of which she is not the point. She’s the right age and the right physical type but nobody notices that because in every other way she bears no resemblance to Mulder’s introject of her. She has no memory of her childhood and doesn’t recognize him; he doesn’t recognize her either. She’s damaged; sometimes she’s lucid and sometimes she’s not, and she has periodic rages. In the X-File where she’s introduced, she contributes to the resolution by knowing something that nobody would ever have imagined she could know. She’s living on the street. Scully is intrigued by her pathology, which does not precisely fit any mental illness of which she is aware. Scully, with a great deal of careful trust-building, convinces Samantha to get a basic medical exam and be treated for some superficial problems resulting from her living on the street. The exam reveals a smallpox vaccination scar and a chip in the back of her neck.

* In a later episode, we discover that Scully is showing Samantha’s picture around to DC area hospitals and institutions. She has been in several, but never for very long, and always as a Jane Doe. She has escaped from several. Staff describe her as highly intelligent but extremely paranoid and delusional. One therapist who made a brief connection with her has saved some of her art. It is abstract, but visually it triggers Scully’s memories of her abduction.

* Samantha has gone back to the street, but Scully tracks her down. Samantha has made herself a shelter where she stores her few possessions. One of them is a rag doll which turns out to be made out of the ragged scraps of a girl’s nightgown. Inside the doll’s body, where a Raggedy Ann heart would be, there is instead something hard and plastic which, when Scully surreptitiously extracts it, turns out to be a Stratego piece.

* Scully assembles enough physical evidence—blood tests, fingerprints, DNA samples—to finally tell Mulder that the woman they met on that earlier X-File is Samantha. Mulder refuses to believe it. Scully insists on the evidence. Mulder wants her to undergo regression hypnosis; otherwise, he says, he refuses to believe it. Scully says there is no way they are doing that to her, it’s not reliable, it’s never been, regressive hypnosis has never either proved or disproved a single thing in the seven years they’ve been together. There is a big fight. They part angry.

* Scully convinces Samantha to stay in her apartment for a few days. While Scully tries to treat Samantha’s symptoms as best she can, Mulder does some soul-searching. He is about to get in the car and go to Scully’s apartment and eat all the crow there is to eat when the alien bounty hunter shows up.

* During a typical action-suspense-fest involving the alien bounty hunter, A.D. Kirsch, Skinner, Cancer Man, and Diana Fowley, Samantha begins to recover her memories—at least her memories of escaping from the alien ship. She used a matter-energy transport device to zap herself out of the ship, but failed to predict how much stress it would put on her organism, especially her brain. Nevertheless, she knows how the thing works, and knows plenty of other stuff about their technology which is all coming back now, and that’s how, when Mulder gets pinned in one of those bright white tractor beams, she and Scully figure out a way to neutralize it using the parts from two government issue flashlights and a car battery.

* The aliens retreat…for now. Mulder accepts Samantha’s identity. She still has no memories of their childhood together. While she undergoes treatment for lingering neurological damage, Mulder and Scully begin making plans to care for her long-term. This involves tentative discussions about cohabitation, some of which are highly amusing.

* Samantha’s earlier memories return. Now mostly healthy, though still on medication and prone to sudden outbursts and moments of confusion and fog, she becomes an unofficial member of the X-Files team, along the lines of the Lone Gunmen. Knowledge she picked up from her captivity on the alien ship allows them to begin developing a picture of this alien culture. This carries the show forward.

I like this idea. It would have provided excellent opportunities for Mulder and Scully’s individual development as well as complicating their existing relationship in ways that aren’t limited just to are-they-doing-it-or-are-they-not-and-if-not-when-will-they-start. Mulder having to deal with his lost sister as a real adult woman, someone very different from the girl he lost, would challenge him greatly; and Scully being caught between her loyalty to Mulder and her growing sense of responsibility for and connection to Samantha would have been interesting to. And. AND. What FUN it would have been if there could have been a Samantha-Cancer Man faceoff. YES. I would have LOVED that. 

Well, they would never have gone there; Samantha was supposed to be a mystery, and that’s what she more or less remains after “Closure.” It would have been a very different show afte rSamantha returned. But it might possibly have been better than the one they wound up writing in seasons 7-9.


End file.
